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The United States is at war. Americans, at such a time, might expect their government to speak to them regularly and report on U.S. goals—and casualties—but so far, they have gotten little beyond prerecorded videos of the president and some sound bites from various officials. Even Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has held only a few briefings.
Perhaps the Pentagon chief’s reluctance to speak to the press is just as well, because many Americans would be alarmed to realize that their sons and daughters in combat are being overseen by a person as callous as Pete Hegseth.
This morning, the defense secretary gave a briefing on the war that quickly degenerated into Trumplike bombast. (Wisely, the Pentagon scheduled this at 8 a.m. eastern time, when most of the country is either sleeping or busy starting their day.) Hegseth apparently prefers to sound more like a Call of Duty player leading a raid than a sober and judicious secretary of defense: “Death and destruction from the sky all day,” he said, along with other empty phrases such as “We’re playing for keeps.” (As opposed to what, exactly?)
Most reporters are now accustomed to Hegseth’s drama-laden antics. But even by the low standards he has set, he managed to shock many of them when he cynically used the deaths of U.S. military personnel to air his own grievances with the press.
On Sunday morning (local time), an Iranian drone hit a makeshift operations center in Kuwait. The Pentagon says that six Americans are dead. Not only is this event a tragedy, but it also requires an explanation: The drone reportedly snuck through U.S. defenses without setting off any alerts, and struck a target that now seems to have been unduly vulnerable to aerial attack.
The defense secretary, the man who is supposed to carry this news to the American public and mourn with them, instead whined about the unfairness of it all. “When a few drones get through or tragic things happen, it’s front-page news. I get it,” Hegseth told the reporters, military personnel, and civilians gathered this morning in the Pentagon. “The press only wants to make the president look bad, but try for once to report the reality. The terms of this war will be set by us at every step. As I said Monday, the mission is laser-focused.”
“Tragic things happen”? Hegseth said this as though it is unreasonable to look any closer at such events. He seems unable to grasp that the deaths of Americans are not merely a public-relations problem: When a drone slips through U.S. defenses and kills six members of America’s armed forces, the deaths of those servicepeople are the story. The people of the United States deserve to know what happened and why. Hegseth complaining that he’s not getting credit for all of the drones that didn’t get through is like an airline executive responding to an air disaster by growling about all of the planes his company made that didn’t crash.
My colleague Nancy Youssef was at the Pentagon this morning, sitting just three rows from the podium. I asked her what the atmosphere was like after Hegseth’s heartless remark. She told me that his comments “sent a stunned silence through the briefing room.” Even members of Hegseth’s staff, she said, seemed to flinch at what he was saying. “Some put their heads down,” she said, while others just looked around. Someone in the room then said: “That was one of the most insulting things I have ever heard,” quietly but audibly and, as far as Nancy could tell, to no one in particular.
Unlike Hegseth, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine opened his remarks by grieving the deaths of the fallen soldiers, saying that “it’s with profound sadness and gratitude that I share the names of four of our six fallen heroes.” He didn’t have the names of the other two, because while Hegseth was griping about media coverage, the U.S. military was completing the next-of-kin notification. (The names could be publicly released as soon as later today.) “Our nation stands with you,” Caine told Gold Star parents, wounded warriors, and their families, “and we are eternally grateful for your courage, your resiliency, your devotion to this mission and to our nation.”
The contrast was unsettling. For years, defense secretaries and top generals have carried the anguish of decisions that have led to troop deaths. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said that he wept as he read the stories of the fallen; some generals have carried photos of those lost under their command—even into their retirement. Hegseth, instead, noted the losses almost in passing, and used them as a vehicle for his ongoing beefs with the press.
But Hegseth wasn’t content merely to carp about the coverage of American deaths. After expressing his irritation at the press, he decided to trash America’s allies. Instead of simply praising Israel—America’s only ally in this war—he took a needless shot at other nations, saying that U.S. allies in the past provided only “ancillary benefits” in global conflicts because they were “maybe willing but not as capable” as the Israelis. Hegseth made this preposterous claim in front of military people who had fought in previous wars alongside these allies—and who saw many service members from these nations sacrifice their life alongside their American comrades.
Hegseth is now holding more press conferences, according to Nancy’s reporting, because some White House officials have privately conceded that they are losing the communications war. The Trump team should have seen this coming: When Hegseth kicked the press corps out of the Pentagon last fall—including reporters from The Atlantic—for not agreeing to publish only Pentagon-approved news, some reporters warned department officials that such a move might make it harder for the public to understand America’s operations overseas, Nancy told me. Now the United States is involved in a major war, and no one in the Pentagon, the White House, or the State Department seems able to explain why without contradicting one another.
In the midst of all this, Hegseth provided at least one moment of clarity: He showed, yet again, why he is an execrable choice to lead the Pentagon. Like his boss, he does not talk to the American people so much as put on performances for them, and this morning, he played the role of the Fox News pundit castigating other journalists. But the people in the briefing room were doing their job trying to get the facts. Unlike Hegseth, they are taking their responsibilities seriously: This is not a game, it’s not a TV show, and it’s not some adolescent test of wills.
Pete Hegseth, if he does not resign, should at least get out of the way and let better men than him talk to the nation and to the press. No one is asking for classified details to be revealed in public; no one expects Periclean rhetoric from a talk-show host. But the people of the United States deserve more of an explanation of what’s happening in this war, and they certainly deserve more of an encomium for their fallen children than “Tragic things happen.”
Related:
- The last days of the Pentagon press corps
- Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon is becoming a bubble. (From August)
Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
- Adam Serwer: The American king goes to war.
- The coming invasion of Iran
- California’s deadliest avalanche turned on one choice.
Today’s News
- NATO air defenses shot down an Iranian missile headed toward Turkey, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that a U.S. submarine sank an Iranian naval ship with a torpedo—allegedly the first such sinking of an enemy ship with a torpedo since World War II.
- The Republican-led House Oversight Committee voted to subpoena Attorney General Pam Bondi over the Justice Department’s role in the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files, as part of its ongoing investigation into the federal government’s handling of the case against the convicted sex offender.
- The Texas Republican Senate primary is headed to a runoff between Senator John Cornyn and state Attorney General Ken Paxton. Texas State Representative James Talarico won the Democrats’ Senate primary against U.S. Representative Jasmine Crockett.
Dispatches
- The Weekly Planet: How many wolves is enough? Now that thousands live in the United States, some people would like to kill more of them, Katherine J. Wu writes.
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Evening Read
The Tyranny of the Relationship Gap
By Faith Hill
Every so often, I hear a time-honored dinner-party question that always leads to lively debate: Would you sleep with your clone?
It’s hard to say where the conversation starter came from. Perhaps it originated with a 2015 BuzzFeed article titled “Can We Ask You a Really Weird Question?,” which inquired—well, you know. Or maybe it can be traced much further back, to works of science fiction that explored similar puzzles. Is a clone conscious? Does it have rights? But today’s clone query, in my experience, tends to prompt chatter about something a little less heady: whether engaging sexually or romantically with someone just like yourself sounds like a creepy nightmare—or whether it sounds like a dream of convenience, of perfectly aligned interests and interactions as frictionless as silk.
More From The Atlantic
- Trump is expected to endorse Cornyn in Texas.
- The real reason Trump went to war, by Yair Rosenberg
- Tesla’s secret weapon is a giant metal box.
- The David Frum Show: Trump’s war with Iran, and a new danger at home
- The dangerous munitions mismatch between America and Iran
- A dire warning from the tech world
Culture Break
Explore. The skin-care industry is coming for toddlers, Nancy Walecki writes.
Hungry? Restaurant chains are rolling out smaller and cheaper options for customers who just want a little treat, Yasmin Tayag writes.
Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
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